Sayonara – Lightweight Qt Music Player

Has the halcyon days of music players for Linux passed? Judging by my own out put over these last few years it certainly feels like it.

Where once upon a time I was writing about at least one new music app a week there are now great long periods of silence.

Well, today I’m making some noise to talk about a relatively new music app called ‘Sayonara.’

Sayonara Music Player on Ubuntu 13.10

Unlike many of the players I used to write about Sayonara Player is not looking to reinvent the wheel, dethrone sliced bread as ‘the best thing ever’, or challenge any other cliché you can think of.

What it is looking to do is, according to its project page on Google Code, offer users a media app with ‘low CPU usage, low memory consumption and no long loading times‘ – something many music players on Linux struggle to do.

Yes, I’m looking at you, Banshee.

Whether or not it truly succeeds in doing that is, like most things, subjective. What a Lubuntu user considers ‘low’ may not be the same as what someone using a System 76 gaming laptop will think.

From my own hands-on I can at least say that it appears to be less resource hungry that Ubuntu’s default music app Rhythmbox. So that’s something.

Looks

‘Behind all the switches, toggles & sliders Sayonara is actually straightforward to use.’

To paraphrase a well known saying: ‘never judge an album by its cover’. And that’s true of Sayonara. It’s not the most visually polished player you’ll set eyes on thanks, in part, to its adherence to the mythical Qt doctrine that non-GTK apps must be complex-looking. That alone might some potential users off.

But behind all the switches, toggles and sliders, Sayonara is actually straightforward to use. The left-hand concerns what’s playing now (and next). The right-hand shows your music library.

Both panes can be tweaked to show as little or as much information as you like.

Features

Music player staples, such as playlist, library sorting/searching, tagging, notifications & album art are all present.

Other niceties offered include Last.FM scrobbling, lyrics, radio station streaming, an in-app ‘steam recorder‘, and an equaliser (see screenshot above).

Controlling the app is simple enough; my keyboard media keys worked out of the box, and while it doesn’t support Ubuntu’s Sound Menu, there is a tray-area menu with various playback buttons.

Does Sayonara have enough of a uniqueness to be favoured over its fellow music players? That’s for you to decide.